Amy Schumer: Cutting

Amy Schumer is the kind of woman who would probably smile and maybe give you a kiss on the cheek right before kicking you in the nuts.

Then she’d apologize and buy you a drink, but it wouldn’t be an expensive drink, and she wouldn’t really be sorry. That’s the flavor of Schumer’s debut album Cutting, a hysterical waltz through Amy’s charmingly filthy head.

If you think I’ve misrepresented her, you only need to listen to the first five seconds of her album, in which she thanks her opening act and then says, “I can’t believe he has AIDS.” From there Schumer manages to insult as many different groups of people as possible – gays, blacks, women, men, her own friends, Jews, Frenchmen, Swedes, I’m pretty sure I forgot a few.

Her delivery is sweet and understated – in a lesser comic’s hands it might almost come off as lazy – which makes a lot of her punch lines that much sharper and more surprising.

She reserves some of her best insults for herself, though, and they are hilarious. There are too many to list, but here’s a sample of my favorites:

“I finally slept with my high school crush. Now he expects me to go to his graduation.”

“I know what I look like. Like, you’d bang me, but you wouldn’t blog about it.”

“We are whores. I’ve taken the morning after pill the night before. But I’m really not that slutty. I’ve only slept with four people. That was a weird night.”

“I do not like the French accent. It makes my vagina shut like a steel trap. Thank God I’ve got that other hole. Party in the back!”

Schumer’s energy slows a bit in the middle of the album, and she mentions AIDS and the morning-after pill too many times. She pulls out the ‘if you don’t have that friend, you are that friend’ line once, which always annoys me. But these are very small complaints about an otherwise excellent album. Besides, as Amy herself says, “Nothing works 100 percent of the time. Except Mexicans.”